It seems so long ago and yet even then, it seemed like he had been around an eternity. In batting his entire career as if in some dogged ode to utilitarianism, Graeme Smith’s 12th Test hundred, all the way back in October 2007 in Lahore, was apt.
Nobody will remember it and he has played far better innings before and after. It was awful to watch. His bat swing originated from all kinds of crooked angles, so that, particularly when he drove straight, the ball never looked like it was meant to go where it did.
He was beaten by spin lots, couldn’t get his timing right and, for long periods, his bat did not look like it had a middle. During that innings, his nickname “Biff”, was flattering him. But as ever the hundred served a dual purpose.
It snapped a run of 17 Tests and two-and-a-half years without a Test hundred and it was his first on the subcontinent. In the process it also secured an important series win and marked the first, true steps of South Africa’s rise to becoming the best Test side in the world.
Even then, five years into his captaincy, Pakistani journalists remarked how much he had matured since his first tour as captain four years earlier. In that was an idea of how long he has been around: he is the only current captain to have led his side even once on a tour to Pakistan, which has seen no international cricket for five years.
Particularly during that innings, but generally through his entire career, it was difficult to separate appreciations of his batting from that of his leadership. The two functions basically served as one, each one consumed by the other and both by a desire to succeed.
It was that way because that is how he began. He has only ever played eight Tests not as captain, the first eight of his career. But it is also because of that remarkable statistic that not a single one of his 27 hundreds has come in a South Africa defeat.
It is especially so because of one of the defining moments of his career, when he came out to bat with a broken left hand and an injured right elbow to try to bat out a draw in Sydney in January 2009.
There was no need for it, because the series was already South Africa’s. There were also no painkillers and he only failed by 10 deliveries to see the day out.
That was the day that marked his unofficial ascension from the acknowledged captain of his side to an undisputed leader of men.
So wedded together became his captaincy and batting that it was jarring to see him bat in ODIs after the 2011 World Cup, since which he has not been captain in the format.
He looked shrunken physically and admitted to feeling a little “uncomfortable”, even insecure, in playing a first international in more than a decade without being captain.
What a toll it must have taken, so that at 33 years and just over a month, he is all spent, with and no more fierceness to give.
In plain numbers that is young. Batsmen-cricketers leave later anyway and more so when they peak late. Ricky Ponting, Rahul Dravid, Mike Hussey, Jacques Kallis and Sachin Tendulkar, all recent retirees, were closer to, if not over, 40 when they did. But Smith, especially Smith, is not leaving young and his career feels as vast as any of those just named.
Try to remember how it was when he took over as captain of South Africa, not forgetting that he was only 22.
Even if he was focused enough to state his ambition to be captain when he was only 12, he had to negotiate his way through the racial minefields of a transformation selection policy.
He also had to skip through an awkward succession from his deposed predecessor Shaun Pollock, as well as carry the team out and away from the corrupted stench of the Hansie Cronje era.
All this he had to carry at the same time as trying to overhaul an underachieving squad and turning them into a decent side, let alone the world’s best – and do it with all the usual administrative foibles of any cricket board behind him.
Imagine the toll. It is a wonder he did not retire earlier, though we all should be grateful for it.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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